Publicity BIO: Miah Jeffra is author of four books—most recently The Violence Almanac (finalist for several awards, including the Grace Paley and Robert C Jones Book Prizes) and the novel American Gospel, finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award—and is co-editor of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart. Work can be seen in StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The North American Review, Barrelhouse, DIAGRAM, storySouth and many others. Miah is co-founder of Whiting Award-winning queer and trans literary collaborative, Foglifter Press, and teaches writing, decolonial studies and cultural theory at Santa Clara University.
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More About Miah: Miah Jeffra is a writer, artist, curator and educator, currently living in San Francisco. A military brat, Jeffra moved throughout their childhood, but most identifies the South as home.
They spent their high school years in Baltimore, and then moved to Atlanta, where they studied Humanities, Music and Performance at Oglethorpe University.
Miah later studied in the MFA Critical Studies program at the California Institute of the Arts and the MA program in English at San Francisco State University. Jeffra teaches Writing, Drama, Decolonial and Cultural Studies at Santa Clara University, and is Founding Editor for queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.
Jeffra finds interest in community-centered arts and discourse and chooses to maintain a multi-disciplinary studio practice for its collaborative possibilities. The subjects of their work range from psycho-geography, urban studies and class to gender structures and whiteness as oppressive construct. Influences include Augusto Boal, bell hooks, Anna Deavere Smith, Richard Rodriguez, Mieke Bal, Peter Brook, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Kazuo Ishiguro, Angela Davis, Richard Schechner, James Baldwin, David Wojnarowicz, Shigenori Nagatomo, Judith Butler, Michael Cunningham, Toni Morrison, Adrian Piper, Colum McCann, Olafur Eliasson, Yuasa Yasuo, Guy Debord and the Situationists, Whoopi Goldberg, Joe Goode, several West African dance forms, and other artists/writers who emphasize process in their work.
